Latest / The SmallBizChat with Melinda Emerson / Strategies for Running Effective Remote Teams with Liam Martin

Transcript

Strategies for Running Effective Remote Teams with Liam Martin · The SmallBizChat with Melinda Emerson

• 0:00
  When you think about asynchronous management, it is fundamentally trying to figure out all of
• 0:05
  the organization's processes, systems, the way that you communicate, all of that information
• 0:11
  needs to be digitized and on a platform.
• 0:13
  So the manager no longer be becomes the person that's actually doing the work but the actual
• 0:17
  platform of the organization is what is doing the actual management day in, day out so that
• 0:22
  people in the organization can focus on bigger and better problems.
• 0:27
  3210 ignition.
• 0:32
  Lift
• 0:33
  off.
• 0:34
  Ending small business failure.
• 0:37
  Welcome to the Small Biz Chat podcast with a number 1 small business expert Melinda Emerson.
• 0:43
  Bolinda's goal is to end small business failure, and she'll give you the information
• 0:47
  you need to succeed and live the life you dream of.
• 0:51
  Now here's the small biz lady herself.
• 0:55
  Melinda Everson.
• 0:56
  I
• 0:58
  I'm Melinda Emerson's small biz lady.
• 1:01
  America's number one small business expert, and I'm so excited to welcome you to another
• 1:07
  episode of the small biz chat podcast.
• 1:10
  Tonight Show is really a good one.
• 1:13
  Now here on the small biz chat podcast, We talk about how to start and grow a successful small
• 1:19
  business.
• 1:19
  My guests have amazing insight to share, and they will give you savings advice from multiple
• 1:25
  angles.
• 1:26
  So now it is time for me to introduce my guest, Liam Martin.
• 1:31
  He's a serial entrepreneur who's the cofounder of time doctor and dot com and staff dot com.
• 1:37
  He's also the co organizer of the world's largest remote work conference running remote,
• 1:43
  which actually that is the title of his new book running remote.
• 1:46
  And Liam is also an avid proponent of remote work and has been published in Forbes, Inc.
• 1:52
  Nashville TechCrunch, fast company, wired the Wall Street Journal, and many others really
• 1:59
  specifically talking about the expansion of remote work.
• 2:03
  Liam is all about empowering workers to work wherever they want whenever they want, and he's
• 2:09
  the author of the new book running remote.
• 2:11
  And so if you're interested in his book, go to running remote.com.
• 2:15
  Liam, welcome to the small business chat podcast.
• 2:18
  Thank you so much for having me, Melinda.
• 2:21
  So tell me, how in the world did you started in business.
• 2:24
  I mean, you you kinda still look like you have that kind of doogie hauser thing going on.
• 2:28
  So, like, what, you know, how
• 2:30
  very much for that debt.
• 2:32
  Started invoices.
• 2:33
  And how old were you?
• 2:34
  Like, when you got the idea for time doctor.com.
• 2:39
  So actually, my business partner got the initial idea for time doctor.com.
• 2:43
  He's actually a medical doctor.
• 2:46
  So we call it time doctor.
• 2:47
  He was a medical doctor, and now he's switching to time.
• 2:51
  So we ended up running with time doctor, which is a pretty good name and we've been working on
• 2:56
  that for about 11 years now.
• 2:57
  But before that, actually, I was running another remote business, which was actually an
• 3:01
  online tutoring company.
• 3:03
  And I've been working remotely since 2007.
• 3:06
  I think that makes me one of the oldest remote workers on block.
• 3:10
  Oh, wow.
• 3:11
  So you're you're an o g.
• 3:13
  Uh-huh.
• 3:13
  Okay.
• 3:13
  So Absolutely.
• 3:15
  So both time doctor and staff dot com, your first company's we're really focused on time
• 3:21
  tracking and productivity.
• 3:23
  Like, is that a personal interest of yours?
• 3:25
  Like, how did you, you know, how did you get into that business?
• 3:28
  I am the most unproductive person on the face of the planet, and I built a tool specifically
• 3:33
  to be able to try to solve that.
• 3:35
  So for me, I could never really and again, it's these entrepreneurial people that you're
• 3:41
  probably that are probably watching your podcast right now, they're the same type of
• 3:45
  mindset.
• 3:46
  They can't actually figure out what they should do, but they know should they should be doing
• 3:50
  something.
• 3:51
  And I was like that.
• 3:52
  So I needed to be able to make sure that there was something that could keep me accountable
• 3:55
  throughout my work day.
• 3:57
  And I used time doctor to be able to do it.
• 3:59
  So it basically lists all of the tasks that I need to do before my work day starts.
• 4:03
  I go through all those tasks.
• 4:05
  It figures out exactly how long it took me to accomplish those.
• 4:08
  And then long term, I can actually look on the return on investment that I'm getting with
• 4:12
  putting my time into email versus maybe delegating it as an example.
• 4:17
  Love it.
• 4:17
  Love it.
• 4:18
  Alright.
• 4:18
  So let's switch gears a little bit.
• 4:19
  I wanna talk to you about the future of work.
• 4:22
  You know, will employers be able to force people to come back to the office?
• 4:26
  Or is remote work and hybrid work?
• 4:29
  Like, is this here to stay?
• 4:31
  So a lot of employers are trying to do it right now, and there's a lot of resistance that's
• 4:37
  ending up coming up just to kind of pull back a second.
• 4:40
  February of 2024 percent of the US workforce was working remotely by March, 45% of the US
• 4:47
  workforce was working remotely.
• 4:49
  Another really interesting statistic is at that same time, people that made a $100,000 per year
• 4:55
  75% of that population was working remotely.
• 4:58
  So not only do the good jobs go remote, but almost half of the United States was working
• 5:02
  remotely.
• 5:03
  Today, we're floating around 30% of the US workforce working remotely.
• 5:07
  And as we're moving from pandemic to endemic, I think essentially we're going to basically fit
• 5:12
  a pretty much at that 30% mark.
• 5:14
  And then at least in my eyes and a lot of other researchers' eyes, we're probably gonna see a
• 5:19
  projection back up to 50% within the next 3 to 4 years.
• 5:23
  Interesting.
• 5:24
  Interesting.
• 5:25
  So, you know, I know that you have some real specific views about remote work.
• 5:31
  So What is it that you think that people got wrong about, you know, with remote work during
• 5:37
  the pandemic?
• 5:39
  So in researching for my book, running remote, I studied about a dozen $1,000,000,000 plus
• 5:46
  remote first companies that were remote before the pandemic, And the one thing that I found
• 5:51
  that they did differently from everyone else is they actually recognize that you need to manage
• 5:57
  remote workers differently.
• 5:59
  It's a concept that I talk about called asynchronous management, which I know is quite
• 6:03
  alien to a lot of people, but effectively, this is building a business without actually
• 6:08
  interacting with other coworkers face to face.
• 6:12
  So as an example, my personal assistant, the person that actually booked our chat together.
• 6:18
  I've worked with her for 6 years, and we work every single day together.
• 6:22
  We have met in person and on video five times.
• 6:26
  Over that 6 year period.
• 6:27
  She has the autonomy to do what she needs to do, and I have the autonomy to do what I need
• 6:31
  to do inside of the organization.
• 6:33
  Effectively managers cease to be the people that manage and the platform is what manages
• 6:39
  organizations.
• 6:41
  Interesting.
• 6:41
  Interesting.
• 6:42
  So Do you believe that employers should just give everybody their choice where they work?
• 6:50
  I think that that's not really actually up to employers.
• 6:52
  To be completely honest with you.
• 6:55
  As we're seeing the transition from pandemic to endemic, we're seeing a lot of those best
• 7:01
  people, right, the 20% of your team that you really know secretly is doing 80% of the work,
• 7:07
  those are the people that can get another job tomorrow.
• 7:09
  We're at 2 a half percent effective unemployment in the United States, those people
• 7:15
  are going to not just ask for remote work as a employee perk.
• 7:19
  It's effectively stable takes at this point.
• 7:21
  And you need to be able to adapt to that new reality or effectively get less left behind.
• 7:27
  Well, so what are the benefits of a remote workforce for a small business in particular.
• 7:35
  So the biggest thing that I can really kind of explain for people that are thinking about
• 7:41
  moving either to a remote or hybrid model or sticking with an in office model.
• 7:46
  Is the 2nd largest cost on your P and L is your office space.
• 7:50
  Number 1.
• 7:51
  Number 2, remote workers that work from home almost every study that I've seen anyways has
• 7:57
  shown their they are as productive or more productive than they're in office counterparts.
• 8:03
  And third is people love to work remotely 77% of people that work in the United States right
• 8:10
  now if given the choice would work remotely.
• 8:13
  So to me, it's really you're getting so many advantages for remote work without any of the
• 8:18
  disadvantages of the office troll drum.
• 8:21
  You know, I don't know if you go into an office every day, but that ninety minute commute every
• 8:26
  single day into the office people and allow us to sleep during that time and not actually get
• 8:31
  any more work done, they would be way more productive.
• 8:35
  That's interesting.
• 8:37
  So one of the things that I've read online is that anyone who wants to implement remote work
• 8:44
  really should analyze their office communication practices because it seems to me
• 8:50
  that it's easy for somebody who's not in the office to not hear something they need to know.
• 8:55
  Is that your thought as well?
• 8:57
  Yeah.
• 8:57
  I think during the pandemic, what ended up happening is people were just recreating the
• 9:02
  office And, unfortunately, they turned working from home into living at work.
• 9:06
  And you have to recognize that remote work is different So the documentation of all of those
• 9:13
  conversations, you can actually digitize those now.
• 9:16
  If you're on a Zoom call as an example, you can record that information.
• 9:19
  You can share it for with other people.
• 9:21
  You can dictate that information.
• 9:23
  You can use project management systems.
• 9:25
  So everything is available to everyone.
• 9:27
  We actually believe that effectively, everyone should have the same informational advantage as
• 9:32
  the CEO of the company.
• 9:34
  And with technology today, you can actually accomplish that, and you can empower everyone
• 9:38
  in your company to actually be as informationally savvy as the CEO so that they
• 9:43
  can make the best decisions inside of the company.
• 9:46
  Interesting.
• 9:48
  What is the one thing that people should do today to get better and managing their remote
• 9:53
  teams.
• 9:55
  So personally, I think that implementing asynchronous management is the biggest thing
• 10:00
  that you need to do to be to get good at managing remote employees.
• 10:05
  So when you think about asynchronous management, it is fundamentally trying to
• 10:09
  figure out all of the organization's processes, systems, the way that you communicate All of
• 10:15
  that information needs to be digitized and on a platform.
• 10:19
  So the manager no longer be becomes the person that's actually doing the work, but the actual
• 10:23
  platform of the organization is what is doing the actual management day in, day out so that
• 10:28
  people in the organization can focus on bigger and better problems.
• 10:32
  What type of software are we talking about?
• 10:34
  Are we talking about everything's held in Slack, some kind of CRM system?
• 10:39
  What are the systems that you think people should be using?
• 10:42
  Yeah.
• 10:42
  So I go into a lot of the, the remote technology stack.
• 10:46
  So effectively a project management system, a communication system, a way to be able to
• 10:52
  communicate email and messages back to people.
• 10:54
  So that would be like Gmail, slack, Basecamp, Trello, Asana, Jira, Zoom, you know, these are
• 11:03
  the tools that you need.
• 11:04
  These are effectively your new office when you really think about it.
• 11:08
  And if you actually do that type of transition, then your people are gonna be a lot happier for
• 11:13
  it.
• 11:14
  Now when it comes to helping your remote workers get set up.
• 11:18
  Do you believe that that BYOD, you know, bring your own device thing still holds, or Do we
• 11:24
  need to be sending laptops to everybody on the team so that everyone has the same level of
• 11:28
  equipment?
• 11:29
  So I think the biggest thing is meet them So do they want new devices?
• 11:34
  Do they actually wanna work from their personal devices, or is there a security issue that you
• 11:39
  need to take into consideration?
• 11:41
  So for us, as an example, we deliver all of our own equipment to our employees to be able to
• 11:46
  make sure that we secure those systems If that person ends up leaving the company, we take
• 11:52
  back that laptop.
• 11:53
  That's a single point of failure for the organization.
• 11:56
  But if you're really just getting started out, a lot of remote workers actually prefer to work
• 12:01
  on their personal devices because they'll jump on to Facebook and they'll jump on to YouTube
• 12:05
  and stuff like that throughout their work day.
• 12:06
  And that's actually fine.
• 12:08
  It's okay for them to do that because we see day in, day out that that actually improves
• 12:13
  people's productivity.
• 12:14
  It doesn't slow them down.
• 12:16
  It's interesting.
• 12:17
  Well, up next on the small base chat podcast, we're gonna talk more about remote work with
• 12:23
  Liam Markin.
• 12:24
  I am Melinda Emerson, the small biz lady, and we will be right back.
• 12:30
  Hi.
• 12:30
  I'm Melinda Emerson, small biz lady, and I wanna welcome you to small biz lady university.
• 12:35
  Our mission here is to end small business failure.
• 12:39
  So all of the courses here are about 2 things.
• 12:42
  How to become or you're ready to get started with social media selling, or if you're really
• 12:57
  just getting started with ecommerce, you might wanna jump into our how to sell and market
• 13:01
  online course.
• 13:02
  Either way, if you want to learn how to become your own boss and do it well, I have everything
• 13:08
  you need here at small bizlatinguniversity dotcom.
• 13:12
  If you have any questions or have any technical problems getting signed up, just email us at
• 13:17
  support at melindamerson.com.
• 13:20
  Take care.
• 13:23
  Welcome back to the small biz chat podcast live.
• 13:25
  I'm Melinda Emerson, small biz lady.
• 13:27
  Your host, And I'm so excited to be talking to you today about remote work and what we all
• 13:33
  need to know to help our employees be more effective in the workplace.
• 13:38
  Alright, Liam.
• 13:39
  Let's talk about what are some of your best tactics to onboard a remote worker?
• 13:46
  The first thing that you need to do is make sure that they've got a good working
• 13:51
  environment.
• 13:51
  I always talk about dividing people's workspace from their social space.
• 13:55
  So they've got a quiet place.
• 13:57
  And even their kitchen table, I'd prefer their own private office, but if they don't have
• 14:01
  that, get them a quiet space, get them a committed space, get their own equipment in
• 14:05
  there, and then really work on their onboarding.
• 14:09
  So what information do they need from you in order for you to not necessarily be a barrier
• 14:15
  towards them achieving their best work.
• 14:17
  When you work remotely, creating meetings with other individuals when you're, you know, either
• 14:23
  a block away or 10000 miles away is very difficult So having all that information
• 14:27
  available to them from the get go is really critical for them to be onboarded properly.
• 14:32
  Now one of the things that a lot of people did during the pandemic was I just heard these
• 14:35
  stories about managers implementing these 15 minute stand up meetings, you know, kind of
• 14:41
  just to, like, see everybody's face every day, make sure people wear, like, actually, you
• 14:46
  know, at their computer kind of thing.
• 14:48
  What is your thought about that?
• 14:49
  Is that effective?
• 14:51
  To me, I don't necessarily think that that's incredibly effective.
• 14:55
  And, again, people can manage the way that they want to, but as I had said before, this is
• 15:00
  turning working from home and to living at work.
• 15:02
  And it's really important to be able to make sure that if you have a safe environment for
• 15:07
  all of your workers, because there are actually some interesting legal cases of people that end
• 15:11
  up, tripping and falling in their garages and soothe their employer because they don't have a
• 15:17
  safe working environment.
• 15:18
  So you need to be mindful of those types of things.
• 15:20
  But if you've gone past all of that from a legal perspective, to me, these 15 minute
• 15:25
  meetings don't work.
• 15:25
  They are fundamentally a distraction, and basically pulling people away from doing deep
• 15:31
  work.
• 15:32
  Alright.
• 15:33
  Well, what is the best business advice you have ever gotten?
• 15:38
  Well, to me, that was probably about 17 years ago when a friend of mine said, maybe you
• 15:43
  should try this remote work thing out it only took about 15 years before remote work really
• 15:50
  became a big thing.
• 15:51
  But now today, it's one of those things that it's not a nice to have.
• 15:55
  It's a need to have.
• 15:56
  And if you don't actually adapt to that and recognize that remote work is the future of the
• 16:01
  way that people are gonna work, you're gonna get left behind.
• 16:03
  Liam, what is your favorite podcast?
• 16:06
  Other than this podcast right now, I would probably say Nick Suji, he has interviewed over
• 16:11
  2000 business leaders for almost 15 years is one of the first podcasts ever, one of the best
• 16:17
  business to business podcasts I've ever listened to.
• 16:20
  Love it.
• 16:20
  Love it.
• 16:21
  I'm I'm a fan of that podcast as well.
• 16:23
  Alright, Liam.
• 16:24
  I know this is like a trick question for you, but what is your favorite business app?
• 16:29
  Other than time doctor.
• 16:30
  I do like Trello and Asana.
• 16:32
  They're both great, but the one that I'm gonna choose is an extension to zoom which is called
• 16:38
  meetings now.
• 16:39
  And what this app does is it will tell you how much everyone is talking inside of your
• 16:45
  meeting.
• 16:45
  So you've got a meeting with, eight people and one person is actually talking 90% of the time.
• 16:50
  You can see that right in the extension, and you can tell that the person, hey.
• 16:55
  Quiet.
• 16:56
  You gotta let some other people talk.
• 16:59
  Interesting.
• 16:59
  I'm gonna have I have never heard of that, so I'm gonna have to check that out.
• 17:03
  What is your favorite business book you have ever read?
• 17:08
  Definitely 0 to 1 by Peter Teal.
• 17:11
  It shows you how to actually build a big business and not necessarily get caught in
• 17:15
  building a business, but instead owning one.
• 17:18
  Which is a very interesting concept for a lot of people to get their heads around, but really
• 17:22
  important for me to learn at least a couple years ago.
• 17:25
  Listen, thank you all so much for joining me for this latest episode of the small biz chat
• 17:31
  podcast.
• 17:32
  I really enjoy doing And our mission is to end small business failure.
• 17:37
  If you're out here still working on your digital pivot, be sure to check out small
• 17:42
  business lady university and my brand new course, social media selling.
• 17:46
  I wanna give you the tools you need to finally start generating the money you deserve online.
• 17:52
  Thank you all so much for being with us tonight, and I wanna leave you with this.
• 17:56
  You never lose in business, either you win or you learn.
• 18:00
  Good night, everybody, and god bless.
• 18:04
  Thank you for listening to the small biz chat podcast with Melinda Emerson.
• 18:09
  For more resources and small business success strategies, visit succeed as your own boss.com.
• 18:16
  Some back to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and join us next Wednesday.